It's almost fall! The season when once again you can turn on the oven without great risk to your personal sense of comfort; the season when we stuff bolder, heartier fruits, likes apples and squashes, into pies and cakes, leaving behind the delicate produce of spring and summer; the season when an oncoming pileup of holiday events provides an excuse to get ambitious. So let's hit the kitchen. But before we do, here are a few things to consider this pastry season.

Take stock

First: Do you have the right tools for the job? Your mileage may vary on the specifics, but here are some I'd have a hard time doing without: a large and small offset spatulas, the big one for frosting cakes and the little one for everything else, from lifting cookies from pans to smoothing batters. A plastic dough scraper, for getting every last bit of batter from the bottom of a bowl, and for easy countertop cleanup. A metal bench knife, for dividing bread dough and cutting brownies and bars. An electric kitchen scale, for precise measuring. A good rolling pin, tapered and without handles, for the most even results.

It's not just the utensil drawer that bears examination; some dry ingredients lose their pizzazz if they're not cycled through quickly enough. Unopened white flour is good for one or two years before it starts to go stale, and flours milled from whole grains turn even more quickly. (Extend the shelf life of flour by keeping it in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer.) Is the sell-by date on that jar of baking powder sometime in 2012? Best to throw it out and replace it—better, anyway, than a batch of flat biscuits. (Or better yet: make your own baking powder.)

Churn your life around

Without wading too deeply into the culture wars, let me just submit to you that butter is, actually, the reason for the season, and something you can make easily at home if you have a stand mixer or a food processor. If you use good-quality cream—and this is something worth splurging on—you'll have butter that shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as the standard supermarket stuff. The method? Just whip the hell out of a bunch of heavy cream—take it to the stiff-peaks stage and then way further, until the fat separates from the buttermilk. Salt if you like; spread on good bread; and set some aside for use in pastries where butter is the star, such as this rich-as-all-get-out kouign amann.

Think different!

Here's a beautiful fact: a lot of the sweeteners available as alternatives to white sugar are dark and minerally—flavors made for fall. We're not even talking about plain old maple syrup or turbinado sugar, either, but about things like sorghum syrup, sometimes called sorghum molasses, which has been made in the U.S. from sorghum grass for centuries, and golden syrup, a British favorite that boasts a warm flavor and can be swapped in for honey or, better yet, corn syrup.

And then there are the flours that pair best with fall, offering a toasty spice unavailable in plain old all-purpose: check out rye, buckwheat, and teff. (Pay no mind to the fact that these are also better for you.)

Use fresh squash

The debate continues over whether canned pumpkin is superior to fresh pumpkin in baking—and whether canned pumpkin is even pumpkin—but in the meantime turn to the lesser-known pastry squashes, like kabocha, which adds a new element of flavor to old standards like pumpkin cake.

Add pepper

Spicy and a little smoky, ground peppercorns are a natural addition to the typical roster of fall spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, all the usual suspects. And not just black pepper, either: we're on record suggesting that the sweet smokiness of Aleppo pepper provides a perfectly sharp counterpoint to a sweet pastry, such as this caramel-topped sweet potato bread.

Use booze

You know what else offers a short path to a lot of flavor? Yep: hooch. The brown liquors are great for fall, of course—check out this deep-dish maple-bourbon cream pie—but the season also rewards sweet and creative uses for red wine, which pairs well here with caramel apples.

You've mastered pie dough, right?

Look, I don't mean to rag on this, but at the same time I kind of want to put frozen purchased pie shells out of business; they just don't compare with the homemade version, which is easy to put together—really!—and infinitely more rewarding. Here, we made you this whole photo gallery about it. No more excuses.